(A) Litany

And her final words were,

“What have they done to me? All these years, where my God has come and avenged me, but it has been for naught! They have done irreparable things, things that should send them tot he Hague, but the soul that is in that body is too meek to seek what just recompense should be found. I want the wind to touch and shimmer me cold again. Those days of Helios taking me by the hand having a stroll through my old school courtyard has long since died. It would only be fair, at least, in this eternal winter to shake as the energy goes from my body. If there is an injustice I have done, I want to rectify it. It seems like I am the only one, walking down the hallowed halls of this school, in December. When will June come? Nay, when will I experience this desolate cold for myself? Stamps upon stamps upon stamps of grades hit papyrus like a hammer hitting hot iron, leaving its statement of impossibility and incredulity upon it. I want to get rid of this glued on hibernal umbrella that they placed upon my head when the showers of my greatness come. Those of my caliber bask in its waters, why can’t I? Is it because I betray myself by being so close, that any step I take will ever be labelled as coming up? When will I stop coming up? Are there any petals left to unfurl themselves upon me, in this blooming summer?

Maybe I am cynical. When the gazelles prance across the transvaal, I am not at the back of the pack, yet I criticise myself for not jumping far enough. It may be that I do not have good enough mates. I want good friends. This is not simply an ask from the universe to bless me with custom humans bent to my will. I have seen the politician and the capitalist bear those people, and I have seen their rot. The question is, what does a good friend look like? Someone not to trust, for humans can never be free of bias, but to trust enough. Not to hold, for the artist can hold their pen better under pressure than I ever will. It has to be a two-way street, but is that street made of asphalt or of dust. Is it a tarmac where the heavy white bodies of man come and put all pressure on? What is it like, to not have people whose head is covered by white noise when they think of you, unable to hold you down like a frantic roadrunner. I want more clocks, one for every room I am in. The shapely countenance of their eyes forming those shapes that tell where Phaethon is looking for his son. I grow fond of its curves, the way its stick moves around its body in circles, going tick-tock-tick-tock like the app I will never install. It is the only thing that understands me, the clock, the thing that moves forward the boulder of reality.

It is only fair if I get my own flat, right? I have been old long enough, I should be able to get one. As you have read, universe, I have been able to learn your trick of time and have a lust towards it. This is enough to earn the most meagre of apartments, right? I do not want to get one from Zillow, though, even if an apartment in New York would be nice. I want to set my station upon the milky way, where the universe is, as close to you as possible, my lord. It won’t be hard, since I am detached from your fabricated reality’s culture myself. Honestly, I could never understand it; it needs congratulation, the way you managed to create such an elaborate play without a single person learning their lines. Can I own the theatre? Please? I want to believe that I can control this circus of ours, at least better than the blank illiterate institutions strewn over Wall Street like loose change. Come on, I know you want to. You have been seeing me all this time, you have seen how good I can be, how faithful I can be to your cause, so just let me in. If there is anything I cannot ask you, It would not be this.

If I cannot have this, I want to be a person I cannot be. It seems so dreary to be like everyone else, I want to be so weird that people want my head on a pike. When there is a debate on television, I want to be talked about. To see the people of my kind off this weirdness fallen across Washington Mall but not myself, I want to see the images of warm blood scattered across the ground, with no person able to pick it up. I do not want to be there. I want to be so incongruent within myself that there is nothing, nothing, that can set me in a true state. May your presence never allow me to get the usual things, because if I do, then my inadequacy could be justified. My collapse into myself should not be on its own merit, but at the hands of those on those boulevards at New York, making a simple business decision. I want there to be systemic factors, I do not want to have free will. Free will would insinuate that all I have done is my fault, like I do think right now, but it shouldn’t be. I want my speech to not matter, for me to not have a say in life, so when people look at my grave they will say that this life was a waste, a rounding error, a statistic in the great wall of math that you have in your septum. I ask, universe, is alienation the greatest gift of all?

I am getting bored of you now. Please get away from me. Let me be a victim of capitalism again, let it take my freedoms away like you have with those bots in those data centres in Western Kentucky or Southern Guangzhou. In this sense, universe, I have already achieved my goal, I have become atomised, I have become consumer, lover of products and owner of nothing. What next are you going to make a subscription service, can I be one? I’ll go for $9.99 for the base version. I would make so much money that I would not know what I will do with it, they would put my head in Forbes. Don’t you want another person in the top 500, purely from selling themselves? I am not talking about labour or anything meaningful, but selling my soul, prod out from me and sold, like that one video game. I do not want to be controlled with a joy-con, but something else. Something more vulnerable, something that lets me be myself in another persons’ eyes. For that, I have learnt in Business Class, and you cannot say I didn’t pay attention cause I got an A in standardised testing, is the worth of economics.

You remember what I said earlier. On top of that, can you remove the part of the mind that creates the home? I do not believe the idea of a home, because it seems wrong. If there is a home, immovable and immortal, then I can never be at home, can never be human in the milky way, yet the warmth of cold space is so good. I want to be human everywhere I go, so violate my body and carve up my brain and remove it. You know where it is, you are the one who made it, aren’t you. Do you feel at home when you grope my brain? You should. Because you are the one who made me feel ‘homesick’, when the pain of existence seems too unbearable and the only thing I can think of is the romanticised place where I was abused by four different people my whole life, like you are doing. Remove it. Now. Those winters when I only had people who would use me is painful, do not leave me. Stay with me, in this operation, as you remove the wanted virus from my body. Just stay with me, leave me here, with yourself, alone.

Thank you, now make sure I am honest with myself. Let me be true to myself. When I grow famous and/or rich, do not morph me to another version of me. You know I only do it for a just cause. My mother survived a war, with gunshots, and she works a mid-tier accounting agency. Can’t I do better? When I walked with my mum in the park one day, I told her this, and she said that it would not be cheating, working in the same place as her, ending up in the same position. She caters to both of our needs, us two, even if you are there. I want to start at the bottom, like her, but roll the dice higher. I understand that lady luck, with her schemes, made us to this position and I should be proud of it — I am — but cannot there be more? Can’t I be a victim of capitalism once more, wanting more than my mother, to put my mum out of the leafy suburbs and get herself a mansion in Accrington, New Zealand? I do not want to do it like those corrupt oligarchs in 1600 Pennsylvania, but to be honest. I need to have a better life than my mother, but any step upon this point is a million steps upon the same staircase.

Be honest in my wants, my litany. Genuinely, when my time comes I want someone to write a biography about everything I did, even if it is right or wrong. I want to be a parliamentarian for state not recognised by the United Nations. I want to be the Prime Minister of a falling empire. I want to be a plaything for a totalitarian machine. I need someone to be so brutally honest that I can fall into my own pit and not be weary that I tripped. This is why I come to you today, my lord, to face myself in my litany. This is not a prayer, but an outcry for myself, for my need to have the sand pour out of my pores at the beach, not hallucinating myself having fun there. There should be a boundary between those two, should there be not? There should be a setting where I can toggle brutal honesty on all the time, but not to get constructive criticism from it, but live within it, to live within my contradictions and crumble under it the same way marxists on twitter say that this system will crumble under its contradictions.

When you see a springbok in the delta, come with me. If there is a far-right party forming a government in Europe, put me inside it. Make me a datapoint in an economics paper. Give me purpose, but do not give me love. Do not give me purpose, but grant me love. I am not talking about the cushy cuddly love that all those people talk about, but real love, love that is limitless in its limits, one that is boundless in its boxed shape. I want to be the Secretary’s baby mama, she deserves it, and I will divorce her soon after, leave her with nothing. I do not deserve consequence, and I do not deserve anything in this litany, but I deserve to have consequence. To have love.

True love.”